Friday morning. Thirty-six days until September 19.
The dinner was Wednesday. I’ve had Thursday and most of this morning to sit with one line Zoe said, and I keep picking it up, looking at it, putting it back down. Then reaching for it again.
The document sounds like something you’re already doing.
I keep returning to that half of the sentence.
The sequence I built, sometime in May, looked like this: consulting is the floor. The thing I know how to do, can price, can turn into an invoice. After that is established, sometime after November 14, I figure out what the writing actually is. Writing comes second because it is less certain, because I haven’t figured out who reads it yet, because I need to be on the other side of this job before I can do it clearly.
That was the order. Consulting first, then writing.
Here is what I’ve been sitting with since Thursday morning: the document has seven stories in it. A meeting note from 2017 that doesn’t fit anywhere. Two sentences I cannot finish. I have been adding to it since June, most weeks, without any particular schedule. It did not wait for November 14. It is not contingent on anything. It has been, to use Zoe’s word, already happening.
I had a 9am check-in this morning. Standard Friday update, deck ready, said what I needed to say. The line was there underneath the whole thing, not distracting, just present. The way an unresolved observation sits below whatever else you are doing.
Before I started writing today I picked the photo for this post. Ten minutes, two options I set aside, one that felt like what this particular morning actually is. I credit the photographer because I would want the credit if it were mine. I’ve been doing this for fifty-something posts and I don’t think about it as a decision anymore. It is just part of what the thing is. I noticed this morning that I was doing it automatically, which might be related to what I’m trying to work out.
I want to be careful about what I’m claiming here. I am not saying the sequence is backwards or that the consulting plan is wrong. That conclusion keeps pulling at me and I keep redirecting away from it, because I don’t think that’s right.
What I think is closer to true: the sequence was descriptive of how I was presenting the plan to myself, not of what I was actually doing. Consulting was the acceptable version, the one with a structure and a rate and a number of clients I had written down. Writing was the thing I wanted to be accountable for later, after I had more cover. “After November 14” was not a realistic timeline for the document. It was permission to want it without proving anything yet.
The document did not observe any of that. The document just kept going.
There are two sentences in it I cannot finish. The first is about what the noticing is for, the actual use of 24 years of reading rooms nobody else was reading. The second starts with “which is why.” Both of them need something I do not have yet. I have been telling myself that what they need is September 19. That I will know what comes after when I am writing as just Leigh, without the institutional context attached to my name.
Sitting here on a Friday morning, I’m not sure that’s right. I’m not sure the sentences are waiting for the date. I don’t know what they’re waiting for.
That might be the more specific thing Zoe named, without quite naming it. Not that the document is ahead of the plan. That what I’ve been calling “after November 14” is not time, and I don’t yet know what it actually is.
Thirty-six days. Whatever those two sentences need, I don’t have it yet. I’ll let you know if September 19 turns out to be it.